John Lievens is associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Ghent University (Belgium). He teaches several courses in statistics and demography. His research focuses on culture and art participation/consumption, amateur art participation, perception of culture, lifestyles, sexual behavior, and partner choice in ethnic minorities. Since 2001 he coordinates the Cultural Policy Research Centre that is commissioned by the Flemish Government and performs policy relevant research on cultural life, broadly defined.

Prof. Dr. Ike Picone is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Senior Researcher within the research group IMEC-SMIT. He is also a member of the Council for Journalism.

The thread within his research is the study of news use practices within the broad field of journalism studies. More precisely, his work focuses on ‘productive’ use of new(s) media, conceptualized within his research as self-publication. The scope is to understand how people participate to media as a social practice, and what motivations and thresholds play a role in shaping this practice. His research topics include user participation to online news, the changing relationship between news audiences and journalists and the role of new media in the emergence of deliberative public spheres.

Coordinator

Research domain: Arts and cultural heritage Research domain: Social participation and social disadvantaged groupsResearch domain: Methodology Participation survey

Jessy Siongers started as coordinator of the Cultural Policy Research Center at Ghent University in 2012. She continues this coordination function in the Knowledge Center on Cultural- and Media Participation. She combines this coordination function with a position at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where she carries out research on social and cultural participation (within the Knowledge Center on Cultural- and Media Participation) and is one of the supervisors of the youth research platform (JOP).

Her main research interests are situated within the domains of cultural sociology, sociology of education and sociology of youth. Within these research domains she has published among others on cultural preferences and values of adolescents, cultural participation, cultural education, values education at school, cultural profiles of teachers, and the socio-economic situation of professional artist.

Researchers

Since January 2017, Mathijs De Baere is attached to the Knowledge Center Cultural- and Media participation. He studied Sociology and health promotion at UGent. The topics he studied are political and economic elites, and harm reduction in substance use. Here he explored the methods of social network analysis and qualitative data-analysis based on in-depth interviews. In the Knowledge Center Cultural- and Media participation he will study the participation of arts and cultural heritage.

Franne Mullens

Department of Sociology - Research Group TORVrije Universiteit Brussel

Tel.: +32-2-614 81 47Mail: Francisca.Mullens@vub.ac.be

Research domain: Local cultural participation and time use patterns

Franne Mullens is researcher at the Knowledge Centre on Cultural and Media Participation attached to the TOR Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel since January 2017. She focuses on local cultural participation and time use patterns. Franne studied Communication Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She also holds a master’s degree in Gender and Diversity. Her main research interests include cultural sociology, media sociology and (gender) equality/inequality.

Ruben Vandenplas

Department of Communications Studies - Research Group SMITVrije Universiteit Brussel